Choker (16 page)

“And did he?” Stanton asked. Fitzgerald was scribbling furiously on his pad.

“Did he what?”

Stanton gave her a look. “Walk you home.”

Cara nodded. “Yes, he did.”

“And what time was that?” Stanton asked.

“Um, I’m not totally sure. Around eleven.” Cara couldn’t believe how calm her voice sounded.

Fitzgerald looked up from his notes. “And how did Alexis seem at the party, Ms. Lange?”

Everyone looked at Cara. The moment spun out in endless ticks of the mantel clock. “Like her regular self.” It wasn’t really a lie. Alexis was
always
a bitch. As she justified the omission of their fight, Cara’s eye twitching slowed, then stopped.

Fitzgerald snapped his notebook closed and nodded at Stanton. They both stood up. Fitzgerald tucked his pen into his breast pocket. “Thank you, Ms. Lange.”

Mom showed them to the door. “If there’s anything more we can help you with . . .” Her words trailed off.

The officers nodded. “We’ll be in touch,” Stanton said. The door swung closed behind them.

Cara and her parents stood in the front hall like actors waiting for their next cue. “Well!” Dad said finally. “This is terrible. I’m glad you could help them, Cara.”

She nodded. The pressure in her chest felt like it was going to crush her. “I really have to go to the bathroom,” she blurted. Turning, she ran up the stairs, ignoring their astonished stares below.

Cara burst into her room. “Where were you on Saturday night?” she barked.

“Don’t shout. They’ll hear you,” Zoe replied calmly. She turned from the window, where she was gazing out at Sydney’s house. “The guy cop was kind of cute, didn’t you think?”

“Zoe, be serious!” Cara went up to her friend and looked right into Zoe’s violet eyes. The whites were bloodshot. “I need to know. Where did you go on Saturday night?” She grasped Zoe’s arm.

Zoe jerked her arm away. “Get off me. I already told you. I hung out at the barn for a while, and then I came back here.”

“Where did you get that pearl?” Cara shot back.

“I
told
you. From my mom.” Zoe’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you giving
me
the third degree?” She paused. “It’s Ethan you really should be worried about.”

Cara backed away. “What do you mean? That Ethan actually could have . . .”—she couldn’t say “killed”—“done something to Alexis?”

I did something bad, Cara. But it’s not anything worse than what he did to me.

Zoe shrugged and picked up an eyeliner lying on Cara’s dresser. She gazed in the mirror above Cara’s vanity and drew a heavy black line above her eye. Her raccoonlike eyes seemed to take up half her face. “Well, that’s kind of what the police were saying, right?” She put the eyeliner down and gazed at her friend. “I’m just trying to help you out here, Car. How about a little loyalty for your best friend?” She studied Cara and smiled suddenly. “Want to do cucumber masks?” She held up a half-squeezed tube. “I found this in your drawer this morning.”

Cara nodded dumbly. She allowed herself to be led over to a chair and closed her eyes as Zoe laid a hot, damp washcloth over her face. It smelled mildewy. Under the thick covering, she felt Zoe pressing her hands over her face. It felt like being buried alive.

Chapter 18

C
ARA THRASHED IN THE TWISTED COVERS THAT NIGHT,
unable to banish the images of Ethan, handcuffed, being shoved into a cell. Or standing in front of a tall courtroom bench, hands shackled to a chain around his waist, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, head bowed as the judge read out his sentence. She pushed the blankets off, lying splayed out in her T-shirt. Ethan couldn’t have done something to Alexis, could he? He was the gentlest guy she’d ever met.
But even gentle people can sometimes snap,
her mind argued. That’s what Zoe would say. And he’d admitted to having a bad temper. . . .

Cara shivered suddenly as a draft cooled the sweat on her body, and she pulled up the covers over her clammy skin. All the while, Zoe slept peacefully beside her, hair striped over her face, hands tucked under her cheek as if she was posing for a Hallmark card. Finally, as gray and pink began to lighten the eastern sky, Cara crept from between the covers and stole downstairs to the silent kitchen.

Samson was crouched on the kitchen counter, his yellow eyes alert, squatting on what Cara first thought was a nest of shredded blue paper. Then she realized it was her gym bag. It was ripped to shreds, ruined, and covered with gray cat hair.

Rage welled up inside her. Her favorite bag, the one she used every day, and this hideous animal dared to just stare up at her placidly like he’d done nothing wrong. “Damn you!” she yelled. She swatted at him, and he hissed and batted her hand away with his paw. She shoved him off the counter as hard as she could. He splatted to the floor, scrambling on the linoleum with his back paws, and fled into the living room.

Cara’s face was so hot she could hardly see. She grabbed the shredded bag from the counter and shoved it into the garbage can under the sink. She slammed the cabinet door so hard it bounced open again. Clenching her fists, Cara stood a moment, fighting to keep from dumping the entire garbage can out onto the floor. After a minute, her pulse slowed to a safer rate, and she carefully closed the cabinet door again and found the Cheerios in the pantry.

She poured some into a bowl and hunched at the kitchen island, blankly spooning the cereal into her mouth. She stared down at the little brown o’s floating in the puddle of milk at the bottom of her bowl and rubbed her temples with her fingers. In just two hours, she would walk into English class. Ethan would either be there . . . or he wouldn’t.

Mom came into the room, wearing jeans and a sweater, her face still lined with sleep. She went straight to the sink and began filling the coffee maker. “Cara, I just got off the phone with Kathy Henning. They’ve organized a search party for today. It sounds like the whole community is involved. Anyway, your father and I are going to join it. I think it would be nice if you did also. You can miss school this one day.” She thrust the coffeepot onto the burner and pressed on.

“Okay,” Cara said. An image flashed into her mind of herself, searching the creek bed. Stumbling onto Alexis’s white hand, sticking out from under a log, the water flowing over it. The Cheerios churned in her stomach. She swallowed hard.

“Everyone is meeting at the Methodist church at nine,” Mom continued, opening a bag of bread. “Dad and I are going over early to help Kathy organize.”

After Mom and Dad left, calling out that they would see her in an hour, Cara continued sitting alone at the kitchen table. Something kept her from going upstairs to her room. She didn’t want to be with Zoe right now, didn’t want to sit on the edge of the bed watching her breathe, as she knew she would do if she went upstairs. Through the open window, she could hear people walking by outside, talking. Cars drove up the street, more frequently than usual. Everyone was getting ready for the search.

Cara sat still as the furnace clicked on and then off, and the kitchen clock counted off the seconds, then the minutes. Two minutes passed, then another. When the clock read 8:45, she slid off her stool, grabbed her phone from the front table, and laced up her sneakers. She pulled Dad’s barn jacket from the front closet and left, shutting the door against the heavy silence in the house.

Outside, it was a crystal autumn day. The sky soared overhead with that deep, soul-stirring blue you only see in the fall. Mums and asters waved from the flowerbeds, and the lawns were still bright green. Leaves were piled high in big, crackly piles at the curbs. Here and there, a pile was squashed where a kid had jumped in it, the leaves spilling out onto the street.

Even from a block away, Cara could see that the Methodist parking lot was full of cars. The front lawn of the church looked like a carnival waiting to happen. Everyone wore jackets and ball caps and stood in somber little groups, talking with their hands in their pockets. German shepherds strained on leashes, and around the corner, Cara saw a half dozen horses pulled up in a circle, their riders chatting quietly as their mounts slung their heads and pricked their ears at the unfamiliar noises and smells.

A big folding table had been set up near the front steps of the church. The Hennings stood behind it, greeting people as they arrived. There was something that looked like a sign-in sheet, and a stack of fliers with a fuzzy black-and-white picture of Alexis. Her own parents were off to the side. Mom was manning a big carafe of coffee, pouring it into paper cups, while Dad rummaged through a cardboard box filled with sugar packets, stir sticks, and creamer.

Sarit and Madeline were standing under a tree at the edge of the lawn with a bunch of other Sherman students. Sarit waved, and Cara nodded, but she didn’t go over. There was only one person she wanted to talk to. She swept her eyes over the lawn again, but Ethan was nowhere in sight. She didn’t dare think about where he might be.

Then a man Cara recognized as Alexis’s uncle climbed the steps of the church, a paper in his hand. “Attention, everyone!” He waved his arms, and the crowd grew quiet. “Thank you, everyone, for coming. This is a terrible time for our family, and it is only the support of our community that is enabling us to get through it. The searchers will be broken into four groups, and those groups will cover Shelton Woods, French Park, the riverbank, and Mill Creek. Thank you to those who brought horses. If you could please take the steep hillsides, that would be wonderful.” The man continued reading from his paper, running through instructions.

The lawn started emptying out. The dog people divided themselves up between the groups, while the horses went off toward the hilly areas of the woods. Cara still hadn’t put her name on the list—she just didn’t want to get that close to Mr. and Mrs. Henning—but as the searchers divided themselves into the four groups, she tagged along on the edge of the group searching the park.

Once they reached the big open space, the leader, a young mom with a baby in a backpack, instructed everyone to form a long line stretching across the park. They were to walk slowly, with their heads down, examining the ground as they walked. If anyone found anything suspicious, they were to call out so that the leader could mark the spot for the police.

Cara took an end position at the edge of the park, next to a skinny, gray-haired man wearing battered motorcycle boots. The woods were to her left. She could hear the searchers from that area snapping branches and calling to one another. She felt a fleeting thankfulness that the search area wasn’t near the old barn. What if Zoe decided to take another unscheduled excursion today?

At the signal from the leader, the group began walking. Cara walked slowly, examining the soggy grass, her sneakers squishing into it step by step. Next to her, the motorcycle boots kept pace. Beyond those, a pair of tasseled loafers were getting soaked as their owner walked.

Then, a pair of trail-running sneakers appeared on Cara’s other side. Cara stopped short and looked up, right into Ethan’s blue eyes.

Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God, it’s you!” she almost screamed. The motorcycle-booted man shot her a startled look, and Ethan pulled Cara by the arm into the cover of the woods.

Cara resisted the urge to throw her arms around him and settled for mumbling, “I didn’t see you earlier.” He looked exhausted. His hair was matted, and his clothes were rumpled, as if he’d slept in them. He shivered a little in his thin jacket as a brisk wind blew, rattling the bare branches. Through the brambles separating them from the park, Cara could see the searchers marching past, calling to one another. One of the horses walked by, his bridle jingling and his hooves squishing in the boggy ground.

Cara hugged her arms across her chest. For a long moment, she searched his face for any clue about where he’d been. But his eyes were dull. They betrayed nothing.

“The police came to the house last night,” she said finally.

He nodded. “Yeah. They went around to a bunch of houses—all of Alexis’s friends.”

“What—what happened?” Cara whispered. He looked so beaten down, like a dog who’d been kicked too many times and couldn’t get back up again.

Ethan sat down on a log behind him and rested his forearms on his knees, staring down at the forest floor. Gingerly, Cara perched next to him. The soggy moss coating the top of the log squished under her rear. She could feel the wetness seeping through her jeans. But she didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was Ethan, here beside her.

He took a deep breath. “They came over about eight and told me I had to come down to the station for questioning. There were two of them. A woman, Stanton, and—”

“Fitzgerald,” Cara supplied.

Ethan nodded. “Right. My parents were freaking out, but the cops kept saying I wasn’t being arrested, that they just wanted to ask me some questions. They might as well have arrested me though, because that’s sure as hell how they were acting. . . .” His voice trailed off, and after a moment’s hesitation, Cara put her hand on top of his. The skin was dry and smooth. He squeezed her hand back, almost convulsively, clutching at it as if it were a lifeline. The words tumbled from his mouth. “They put me in this little room, just like in the movies, and kept asking me over and over what happened that night. It was like they were expecting me to say something different, but all I could tell them was the truth.”

She held her breath. “What—what was the truth?” Her voice shook a little. She couldn’t bear it, just couldn’t, if Ethan had done . . .
something
. . . to Alexis.

His brow creased. “You know. Alexis and I had that fight, and then I walked you home. And then I went home and fell asleep.” Ethan shook his head. “I felt like a criminal. Like I was covering something up even though there was nothing to cover up. I felt like they were going to catch me.”

“It sounds so awful.” Cara squeezed his hand.

He nodded. “It was. But it could have been so much worse, if it wasn’t for you.”